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By Land and Sea, Curaçao Seeks to Sustain Its Coral Bounty

Pace University students filming a documentary on coral conservation in Curaçao shielded their camera from the rain during a brief downpour.Credit Andrew C. Revkin

Updated, 12:02 a.m., March 21 |
WILLEMSTAD, Curaçao — I apologize for the prolonged blog silence (I have withdrawal symptoms!), but this week has been devoted to filming, not writing. Since my move to Pace University five years ago, I’ve been working each spring with a colleague, Prof. Maria Luskay, to focus a long-running documentary production course on environmental stories.

This year’s film, “Curaçao’s Coral Challenge – Reviving the Rain Forests of the Sea,” will be the third to explore humanity’s evolving relationship with the oceans (along with our sea turtle and shrimp farming films).

As with all of our previous films, this one (coming in mid May) will center on a society seeking to enhance its economy without diminishing its environmental patrimony. In Curaçao’s case, the challenge is finding ways to move beyond an economy based for nearly 100 years on refining Venezuelan oil to a more diverse one including substantial tourism — but doing so without degrading the still-vibrant reefs ringing parts of its coast.

A coral disease spread across the Caribbean in the 1970s, wiping out 95 percent of elkhorn and staghorn populations. Photographs show the impact on Carysfort Reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary from 1975 to 2004.Credit Phillip Dustan/IUCN

Last month, Curaçao, along with Montserrat, signed an agreement with the Waitt Institute, a group devoted to “using the ocean without using it up,” to develop a marine management plan that is both politically viable and environmentally sound. This is no easy task, in large part because limiting impacts on reefs is as much about managing activities on land, the main source of pollution, as it is about managing activities on the water.

The institute is led by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a young marine biologist with Caribbean roots and a passion for policy. She’ll be featured in our film, along with Glenn Sulvaran, a member of parliament with a passion for reef conservation, and Faisal Dilrosun, a government health and environment advisor.

The first such “Blue Halo” initiative was launched in Barbuda in 2012 and recently produced pioneering ocean zoning legislation there.

Photo

One-year-old colonies of endangered elkhorn coral grown in an aquarium were cemented to boulders along the Curacao coast in August, 2012.Credit Paul Selvaggio/Secore.org

The film will also describe a coral propagation effort pursued by the Secore Foundation, Carmabi Foundation and Curaçao Sea Aquarium — in particular the work of Valérie F. Chamberland, a biologist who has spent nearly five years cultivating extremely endangered elkhorn coral in tanks and cementing them on boulders just offshore. The oldest batch, “planted” two and a half years ago, is poised, if all goes well, to produce its own spawn in August, Chamberland told us.

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Valérie F. Chamberland, a marine biologist, examines a colony of endangered elkhorn coral growing on a breakwater in Curaçao three and a half years after she and others cultivated it from spawn in a Secore Foundation research project.Credit Andrew C. Revkin

We arrived in Curaçao last Saturday and leave tomorrow with hard drives jammed with gigabytes of interviews and images of tropical fish and untreated sewage, pristine and overbuilt coastlines, coral nurseries and oil rigs, divers and fishermen (some of whom question the need for no-fishing zones) and much more.

We’ll describe many challenges facing those seeking to sustain the environment in the face of development pressures, but my sense is that we’ll end on an optimistic note given the energy and determination of the people we’ve met, including Ryan De Jongh, who not only leads kayak tours but has spent years, on his own time, planting and propagating mangrove seedlings along shores denuded in the past.

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In a Curaçao bay, a student filmmaking team from Pace University kayaks past a mangrove propagation project run by Ryan De Jongh, an ecotourism guide and environmentalist.Credit Andrew C. Revkin

Postscript, 12:01 a.m., March 21 | * I’ve adjusted language at the asterisks to better reflect the condition of reefs in various parts of the Caribbean.

About

By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.